ATHE_Transcript_Ep 415_Dr. Fiona McCulloch
JJ Virgin: [00:00:00] Hey, it's JJ here. So this is super cool. We have had my buddy Dr. Fiona McCullough on before. And I love reading her blog and we will put the resources, her blog and all that stuff in the show notes at jjvirgin.com/DrFionaclock, D R F I O N a clock C L O C K. You'll find out why in a minute. Anyway, I was reading this blog.
She wrote about fat cells and their circadian rhythm. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I need you on this show talking about this. So that's what we're gonna be talking about today. That fat cells, your fat cells actually have. A circadian rhythm. And when you know what that is, it will help you make the right decisions about when to eat because kind of obsessed with not just what to eat, but also when to eat.
Cause it makes a big difference. Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Fiona. She's a naturopathic doctor. She's the founder of white lotus integrated medicine clinic in Toronto, Canada. [00:01:00] She's been serving thousands of women with hormonal issues since 2001. And is an expert in P C O S. She wrote the book eight steps to reverse your P C O S.
She's also the medical advisor and has developed a nutrition methodology for the open source health P C O S project. And she has an amazing gift for all of you today as well. Again, you'll be able to get all this at jjvirgin.com/DrFionaclock. And now, you know why I put clock in there. She's gonna give you a great resource on insulin demand.
So you're gonna be able to grab that too. Now, before we dive into the show, I wanna do a shout out to Vicki Platt who left us a five star review on apple. Podcasts says I've listened to several podcasts while getting the fall garden bed ready for plants listened about skin and sex. The brain, sleep and more.
Learn so much. Thank you, JJ Virgin for having such informative guests on so [00:02:00] many topics. All right. Make sure that you are subscribing at subscribetoJJ so that you can get all this awesome stuff. Of course, while you're there, I'd love to have a review from you so I can chat you out now. So if you've got something you'd love to know more about let us know.
So we can go out and either seek the best expert in it, or I will do my solo on it and same with questions and answers. All right. Now, before we dive in today, I wanna share another fade with you here. It is.
Hey, super excited to have you on the show, Dr. Fiona McCullough. Thank you so much.
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: Thank you so much for having me, JJ.
JJ Virgin: Well, it's been a while I had to, I read this article and then I bombarded you because you, it was so fascinating. So, I mean, I, I am really thrilled to be diving into this whole idea [00:03:00] about circadian rhythm and.
That fat cells have a circadian rhythm. Oh my gosh. Like so awesome. So let's, let's kind of take it back from the beginning and talk about what the heck is circadian rhythm anyway. And why does it matter?
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: Absolutely. Yeah. I, when I found this study, I was just like mind blown. I was just amazed with it. So you know, the circadian rhythm is really a rhythm of time, you know, with the body and, you know, typically it's, it's thought of as a 24 hour period.
And so it's the way that things happen at certain times in the body. So, for example, we all know that cortisol, the stress hormone has a circadian rhythm where it's released primarily in the morning, and then the levels decline throughout the rest of the day. And many other things in our bodies run on a circadian rhythm too.
JJ Virgin: So like, first of all, this, this. Like, I'd never [00:04:00] thought I've always thought about circadian rhythm and how it impacted health and weight in terms of like, I remember the first time I looked at it, it was, I had a client early on, this was probably 30 years ago. So 25 years ago, and she was a nurse who did the graveyard shift and she said to me, she goes, you know my friends have told me that I can't lose weight because I do the graveyard shift.
Well, I didn't know anything about this Fiona. So I said, oh, that's ridiculous. Of course you can. That wouldn't impact it. Now she lost a hundred pounds and I kind of at the time thought, well, maybe it was better. I didn't know what, I didn't know but I now know that that could have a huge impact on it.
So let's talk about like, you know, how does circadian rhythm affect weight loss and why what's going on?
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: Yeah, absolutely. So there's been a lot of research into this in the past, maybe 10 years and what we've been finding, you know, time and time again [00:05:00] in different studies is that. Really, if your sleep is disrupted, or if you happen to work shift, work like this nurse who is your client?
There is definitely weight gain associated with that. There is more insulin resistance, which causes us to gain weight. And it's been, you know, sort of known that when people start shifting their hours, when they start traveling to different time zones, they, they actually can easily gain weight. And in particular more around the midsection, because it does.
influence our levels of insulin in the body, which causes to gain weight around that area.
JJ Virgin: So you talked about that in gaining weight, but we're really talking about gaining fat. So let's kind of dig into fat and what it really is because it's not, I, I remember like years ago it was like, fat's just like this bad backpack you're carrying around.
It's like, well, no, not really.
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: yeah. Yeah. You sort of remember that wheelbarrow from Oprah where she brought that out. Uhhuh. [00:06:00] Yeah. Just like a big, you know, mound of. Fat. Yeah. It's just
JJ Virgin: a blob of stuff.
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: yeah. And you know, like what they've been finding is that's not true at all. So fat is actually an endocrine organ, so it actually makes hormones, it does lots of things.
It tells our brain how much energy we have stored. So it's a very active. You know, hormonal system are fat. It's not just, you know, a storage unit. That's just, you know, pump of energy and we just burn it. It actually does a lot of communicating with our body and it's actually really important for our metabolic health.
You know, how our fat cells are actually functioning.
JJ Virgin: So. Then, how does this relate to like fat cells, circadian rhythm? How does this all play together?
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: Yeah, so this study was really interesting and what they did was they actually took some people who had a fairly normal circadian rhythm to start with.
And then they actually started put them into a routine where they were eating [00:07:00] at the same time. They were sleeping at the same time. And they did that for 10 days to kind of get them all matched up and on the same kind of clock. Then what they did was they took away that routine. They took away daylight temperature and they put food into a very standardized window, which was.
Evenly distributed throughout the day. And then they just looked at the actual time and they looked at what the, the people's fat cells were doing. They started measuring the fat cells every six hours. So they actually biopsied the fat cells and measured what their genes were doing inside. And what they found was that the fat cells just based on time.
So not based on, you know, how, how long ago you've eaten, not based on when you've been sleeping, but just simply based on the time your fat cells do profoundly different things. So there was a huge difference between what the fat cells were doing, for example, in the morning and at nighttime.
JJ Virgin: So, what were they doing?
What are they doing in the morning versus nighttime?
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: So it's [00:08:00] so it's so interesting. Cuz in the morning the fat cells actually did a lot of different things that were sort of similar to manufacturing. So they were involved in, you know, making hormones, making cytokines that send signals to the rest of the body making, you know, a variety of different adipokines, which are.
You know, different little hormones that are fat cells signal to tell our body to do different things. And then at nighttime, what they found was that the fat cells were in a completely different state. So what they were doing was performing antioxidant actions and breaking things down. So they were breaking down, you know, fat itself.
So that's called lipolysis. So they do that more at nighttime and they were breaking down organic acids, which are byproducts of different metabolic processes in the body. So they were in completely different states in, in the day and in the nighttime.
JJ Virgin: Well, so knowing that then, because something I've been so [00:09:00] fascinated with.
Is, and I've watched this whole progression Fiona from, you know, 20, 20, 25 years ago where you were supposed to have breakfast, a snack lunch, a snack dinner, and then, oh my gosh, you better have a snack after dinner too. yep. It's like, oh, really? It's a snack from, from that to going. All right. Well, Let's not snack to going, let's eat within a 12 hour period to let's eat within an eight hour period to the latest I just saw was a four to six hour period.
And from that first shift of intermittent fasting saying, Hey, skip breakfast and have a later, you know, have lunch and dinner. And I kept thinking, well, everything I've ever looked at says do this earlier. So I'm really fascinated by, you know, of course we wanna look at food quality and. We need to look at what we're eating, but I think, you know, what this is really showing is when you eat matters.
And I wonder if some of this is, you know, how does this tie into all of this intermittent [00:10:00] fasting time, restricted eating stuff, and what are the lessons that we can take? I know I'm throwing all this stuff at you. What are the lessons that we can from the fact that these fat cells do different things at different times with how we should be tying that to when we should be eating.
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: Yeah, of course. And you know, what we wanna do with this information is just use it to maximize our metabolism, because if we're kind of not synced up with what our, our fat cells are doing, you know, according to the time that we're eating, which also affects them quite a bit, then we're not gonna be, you know, getting all the benefits that we're trying to get.
From the changes that we're making with the diet. So if you look at eating at night, you know, your fat cells really aren't supposed to be storing and manufacturing at night. They're really more in a burning and also in a breaking down mode. So you're sort of. Losing that benefit that you're getting that normally happens at night and that's really important for metabolism.
You're, you're interfering with that. And then in the [00:11:00] daytime, you know you know, in the, in the daytime, really we are supposed to be manufacturing and the fat cells are really involved in a lot of different processes. So. Fasting in the morning can be okay. And certainly these fasting windows you know, are much better than eating continuously all the time.
But shifting it more towards eating earlier in the day and stopping earlier in the evening is always gonna work better with that clock in the fat cells, because that clock depends more on time and not so much on eating or sleeping.
JJ Virgin: Yeah. That's, you know, it's like, that's what I'm noticing. That seems to make the most sense.
I think some takeaways here and I'd love to just get your opinions on 'em number one. A takeaway of stopping, eating. Earlier in the evening, from what you've seen, you know, how many hours before bed, because the, I just read the latest one that was saying, Hey, you know, ideally you'd be eating from 8:00 AM till 2:00 PM.
And I'm like, [00:12:00] wow. But I also think, well, wouldn't it matter what time you really are going to bed and what time you are waking up. Cuz it's very different for someone waking up at six versus someone waking up at seven, very different for someone going to bed at nine, versus someone going to bed at 11.
You know, how many hours before bed would you think it's ideal to shut that kitchen down? Cause I, I think that of anything we do is probably one of the most effective things that you could start with is just to shut that kitchen down. Oh
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: yeah, absolutely. So I always tell people, you know, 7:00 PM or three hours before bedtime is kind of, you know, what to, to shoot for.
If you can do a little bit longer than that, that's even better. So if you could stop eating by six that's even better. And the research shows us as well, that the stuff that we eat at night, Is always gonna be worse than the stuff that we eat in the morning. It's just sort of, you know, the end of the day, , we're all stressed and you know chocolate, it's like what we want at night.
Right. So it's not only just the time and getting into that rest date, but also the types of choices that we make at night that are not the [00:13:00] best.
JJ Virgin: Yes. We do tend to be much more virtuous in the morning. It's way easier. And it sounds like if you were gonna, so here's the other side of the coin. If you were gonna blow it.
If you were going to go and say, you know, and I'm not gonna even call it cheap because to me, I look at it and I go, we should get like a B plus on our diet. You do not need to be perfect. No. Yeah. But it is funny because when you look at like, when people do tend to go sideways, you know, they're not having birthday cake for breakfast, most likely.
No. Right. So if you were going to go sideways a bit, when would the best time to be.
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: Well, you know, like what I always tell people is, you know, if you're gonna eat a little bit more, you know, definitely having a good breakfast is very important. We're also not as hungry in the morning. So, you know, if there's something that you're eating in the morning, you're really not gonna overeat on it.
I think what, the way I look at that is if it's something. That [00:14:00] you really enjoy, and you're really moderating the amount. It could be okay to have that with your dinner, but then to cut it off after that, as long as everything, you know, your whole meal is really balanced and, and stable with respect to how it'll affect your blood sugar.
So making sure it has lots of protein, lots of vegetables, which gives you fiber, lots healthy. Those will definitely just stabilize your blood sugar. And then if you were to have a couple of scores of dark chocolate, once in a while with the dinner is actually a good time to do that. Because you are gonna be embarking on a fast after that, where you're not gonna be eating for a little while.
So it is actually, I always view that as okay to do, but you know, of course gonna have a treat and you have it with your breakfast. You're much less likely to overeat on it, just cuz of your natural appetite being low at that time.
JJ Virgin: So latest, last takeaway from like all this information. What are your recommendations now in terms of like, are you having people do eat within an eight hour window, a 12 hour window?
Like what, what's your recommendation [00:15:00] out there as a big insulin? The, the queen of really understanding how insulin demands are on the body and how best to regulate these things, what would you
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: tell? Yeah, so. So I work primarily with women who have hormonal issues. And so we always have to be like a little bit more gentle cuz sometimes, you know, the hormonal situ these situations can be, can become worse, you know, from certain types of more strenuous fasting.
But what I find for everyone is that a 12 hour window is. You know, generally works for most people, very, very well. And then, you know, for people who've got a lot of weight loss resistance or insulin resistance, I'll often do, you know, an eight hour window for those, those patients with two meals. And I have also recommended, you know, a single meal a day for certain patients who are you.
You know, maybe really, really insulin resistant and struggling with type two diabetes. And that should always be medically supervised, but I've used a lot of different windows. And I think it really depends on your level of activity, your level of tolerance for [00:16:00] fasting, how healthy you are in the first place and how bad the insulin resistance is that you're trying to overcome.
So for somebody who's got. You know, who's a, pre-diabetic, who's got a lot of insulin resistance. They actually sometimes need to move into more of these shorter windows of eating and it just gives them so much more time without insulin playing a role. So when you're not eating your insulin will go down at that time.
And that just helps people to become much more sensitive to insulin, cuz there's less of it. There all the time. So I have actually, you know, tried a lot of these different windows and I think the most important thing though, is to just make sure there is a nice block of at least 12 hours, where there is no eating happening to allow all of these different functions in the body to work at the right time.
It's almost like an interconnected system. And if you're eating during that time, you're almost messing with many different mechanisms of the body that are meant to sort of be. In a fasting window, as opposed to an eating window. [00:17:00]
JJ Virgin: I love how you explain that. And I, I just, you know, love that we are looking beyond just what you're eating as to when, as a real powerful way to help with blood sugar and insulin.
And I know you've got one other thing you're gonna be giving everybody and that's your food insulin demand list. And, and Let's put this whole thing at jjvirgin.com/DrFionaclock. Cuz I think we've done a Dr. Fiona, cuz you are a reoccurring guest of brilliance on the show. So we'll do Dr. Fiona clock tell everyone about the food insulin demand list so that, that they will be able to get as their gift from.
Oh, thank you,
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: JJ. And I know that you're very, you're one of the pioneers in, you know, understanding insulin resistance. And I remember following you like, many years ago and watching what you were saying about this. So the food insulin demand is actually a metric kind of similar to the glycemic index, but it tells us how much our insulin goes up.
When we eat a food. For example one food that's [00:18:00] very. Spiking to our insulin is dairy protein. Even though it's low in the glycemic index, it causes our bodies to make a lot of insulin. And so many people react badly to dairy either from, you know, sensitivities, but also because of the massive spike of insulin it causes.
So this list goes through all of the, you know, most. Common foods that we would eat and gives you their food, insulin demand number so that you can learn, you know, which of the foods might be really triggering your insulin to go higher than you're imagining.
JJ Virgin: Yeah. So key critical it's, you know, I, I think back to just the classic agave.
Yes. Right. And Crystaline fructose that they'll put on a label and they'll go, you know, low on the glycemic index. And it's just why we have to look beyond that because you can still spike insulin. And have something low on the glycemic index. So I think this is just brilliant. I'm excited. Everybody will grab this.
I super appreciate it. And I appreciate your time today, Dr. Fiona, thank you so much for coming back on
Dr. Fiona McCulloch: the show. Thank you, JJ. It's been amazing to be here again.
JJ Virgin: So [00:19:00] after the break, I'm gonna give you your top takeaway from this episode. So stay with me.
Welcome back. All right. This is the time when I do a debrief, give you an action item after what we've heard today. And so, again, I I'm setting this whole protocol out on a roadmap for how to just continue to up level your health. And it starts with improving the quality of your food. Then doing a, doing some detoxifying, then starting to figure out your food intolerances, but along the way too while we look a lot at focusing on what you're eating, I also want you to think about when you're eating.
So if right now you haven't really been paying attention to that. Step one is to get that kitchen closed at least three hours before bed. Now this does not mean go to bed later. Okie doki? deal? And to give yourself a solid 12 hour [00:20:00] overnight fast. So if you stop eating at seven, then you do not eat breakfast before seven in the morning.
Kind of my rule of thumb now is to eat in the morning when you get hungry. So that might be an hour, two hours, three hours after you wake up. And stop eating at least three hours before bed longer is better. And so that starts with doing a 12 hour fast, and then we just continue to look at if we can shrink that down to a, to a 14 hour fast and then maybe to a 16 hour fast, I tend to do those more on the weekends when we get up later, we can eat earlier.
But again, a lot of great research coming out now on, on shortening that, that feeding window and doing time restricted eating. All right. Just another little reminder, make sure you get the cool information from my buddy, Dr. Fiona, at JJvirgin.com/dr.Fionaclock. And if you haven't left a review yet, I would love, love, love to shout you out.
So subscribetoJJ. That's where you go. So you don't miss any of the episodes. [00:21:00] And while you you're there leave a review and I will give you a shout out. All right. See you next time. Bye.